#200 1971 · Blue Ribbon Sports (Nike) · Footwearwrong-door
When a new synthetic track at Hayward Field left runners with no grip and no spikes, Bill Bowerman poured liquid rubber into his wife's waffle iron to prototype a tread pattern no shoemaker had been willing to engineer for him
the problem
No shoe sole gripped the new spikeless synthetic track surface
background
In 1971, Bill Bowerman — University of Oregon track coach and co-founder of Blue Ribbon Sports, the Japanese-shoe importer that would become Nike — faced a problem money couldn't fix: a new synthetic urethane track laid at Hayward Field two years earlier was chewing up runners' feet. Metal spikes dug in too deep and slick flats didn't bite at all. He had already asked established shoe manufacturers to engineer a spikeless, high-traction sole; none were interested.
One morning, watching his wife Barbara make breakfast, Bowerman studied the grid on her waffle iron — a 1936 wedding gift — and poured liquid urethane straight into it, gluing it shut and ruining it. He bought secondhand irons and kept experimenting, filing a patent for the resulting multi-sided tread stud in 1972 (granted 1974). Early versions raced at the November 1971 NCAA cross-country meet; the geometry became Nike's first true commercial hit as the 1975 Waffle Trainer.
the move
Bowerman used a household waffle iron as free, instant prototyping tooling, pouring liquid urethane into its grid to test a multi-directional, spikeless traction pattern that no shoe company would engineer for him.
the payoff
The waffle-soled 'Moon Shoe' prototypes never reached mass retail — only a handful sold from Nike's Eugene store — but the geometry Bowerman found in his kitchen was patented in 1974 and released as the 1975 Waffle Trainer, Nike's first bestseller, with orders topping 100,000 units that year. The commercial payoff landed roughly four years after the kitchen experiment, not the two years sometimes claimed.
what came after
The waffle outsole became the founding signature of Nike's product-design culture and is still reissued; the ruined original waffle iron, recovered decades later from a buried rubbish pit on Bowerman's property, now sits in Nike's corporate archives, while the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds an original waffle-soled shoe in its permanent collection.
references
- [1]From Waffle Iron to World Stage: The True Story of the Nike Moon ShoeNIKE, Inc. (Department of Nike Archives), 2025about.nike.com
- [2]Nike LDV with "waffle" soleSmithsonian National Museum of American History, 2023americanhistory.si.edu